Whatever Happened to the Small Modular Reactor Revolution?
By Felicity Bradstock – Jun 21, 2026, https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Whatever-Happened-to-the-Small-Modular-Reactor-Revolution.html
- The United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia are investing heavily in SMR development as part of broader nuclear expansion strategies.
- China and Russia remain the only countries with commercially operating grid-connected SMRs, while most Western projects are still in licensing or early deployment stages.
- Regulatory hurdles, financing challenges, supply chain constraints, and dependence on HALEU fuel continue to slow commercial deployment worldwide.
In the early 2020s, there was great enthusiasm around the development of the small modular reactor (SMR), which was expected to support a nuclear renaissance. However, after supply chain disruptions, technical difficulties, and other challenges, it is unclear whether SMR development is progressing as expected. Nevertheless, some companies continue to invest heavily in the technology, hoping it will help drive innovation and expansion in the nuclear power sector.
SMRs are advanced nuclear reactors with a power capacity of up to 300 MW(e) per unit, equivalent to around one-third of the generating capacity of a conventional nuclear reactor. SMRs are much smaller than conventional reactors and are modular, making them easier to assemble in factories and transport to the site. Thanks to their smaller size, SMRs can be installed on sites not suitable for larger reactors. SMRs are also [supposedly] much cheaper and faster to build than traditional nuclear reactors and can be constructed incrementally to meet a site’s growing energy demand.
Several countries are pursuing SMR development, including the United States, China, and Russia, as well as Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Russia and China are currently the only two countries with grid-connected, operational SMRs. Russia’s floating Akademik Lomonosov plant produces electricity and heat, while China’s HTR-PM, a high-temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor, generates just electricity. Japan also has an operational high-temperature engineering test reactor, but this is categorised as a research and test reactor rather than a commercial reactor.
In the United States, the government has supported private SMR innovation through favourable federal policies and regulations. TerraPower, X-energy, and NuScale are among the leading companies advancing SMR development. In May 2025, President Trump issued four executive orders aimed at revitalising U.S. nuclear power. While Trump has generally pushed for more fossil fuel expansion and restricted renewable energy development, he has been vocal in his support for nuclear power since coming into office.
Trump aims to support the deployment of new nuclear reactor technologies and expand American nuclear energy capacity from around 100 GW today to 400 GW by 2050. In December 2025, the Department of Energy selected the Tennessee Valley Authority and Holtec Government Services to support early deployments of advanced light-water SMRs in the United States, with the teams expected to receive a combined total of $800 million in federal funding for initial projects in Tennessee and Michigan.
The United States is also collaborating with other countries to advance SMR technology. In March 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a $40 billion energy partnership with Japan to deploy GE Vernova Hitachi (GVH) BWRX-300 SMRs in Tennessee and Alabama as part of the U.S.-Japan Strategic Investment initiative.
Meanwhile, in the U.K., in 2025, the government selected aerospace company Rolls-Royce as the preferred developer of SMR technology, with over $800 million in financing from Britain’s national wealth fund. Rolls-Royce will develop its first SMR project at Wylfa on the island of Anglesey, where plans for a conventional nuclear plant were scrapped in 2020. In June, Rolls-Royce SMR was chosen by the Swedish development company Videberg Kraft to build SMRs in Sweden, marking a major multibillion-pound export deal between the U.K. and Sweden.
While there has been widespread government support for SMR development, many hurdles have stood in the way of commercial deployment. Several companies have already presented compelling prototypes and positive laboratory results, but translating this into repeatable commercial deployment is a complex task. Over 120 distinct SMR designs have been recorded globally, compared to 83 in 2022. However, many have not achieved licensing, and most are still on the long road to commercial deployment.
In Europe, one of the main hurdles is the fragmented national regulators, differing political positions among member states, and the limited ability to deploy large-scale public capital rapidly. Meanwhile, in the United States, the deployment-oriented approach, which focuses on accelerating advanced nuclear licensing, has spurred private SMR development, but has not prioritised long-term coordination and industrial harmonisation.
A funding gap persists for SMR development in several regions of the world, although greater federal and private financing has helped the U.S. advance SMR development, with the first U.S. SMR commercial deployment expected in 2028.
Meanwhile, many advanced SMRs are powered using HALEU fuel, which has between 5 and 20 per cent enriched uranium, and is produced almost exclusively in Russia. The United States and some other countries are gradually producing their own HALEU supplies, although strict sanctions on Russian energy have delayed SMR deployment in several places.
While SMRs are likely to play a major role in the nuclear industry’s future, severe delays and funding gaps have slowed deployment. The United States is currently playing catch-up with China and Russia, while Europe and other regions of the world could still be several years behind in commercial SMR deployment
The Nuclear Reactors Coming to a Small Town Near You
As a disruptive new nuclear power project embeds itself in Parsons, Kansas, residents are divided on whether it’s worth the potential risk.
The New Republic Finn Hartnett, June 16, 2026
Parsons, Kansas …… With a population of about
9,600 ………
……………………………………The Parsons Sun had it first: a deal struck between industrial park board members and the nuclear company Deep Fission. A first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor was coming to the park. “I saw it on Facebook, and I thought it was a joke,” Marjorie Reynolds, a home nurse who lives in the area, said. The public was not informed before the deal was completed: Even county commissioners were only told “a week or two” prior, according to Commissioner Terry Weidert. “They just announced it in the newspaper December 4, like it was a done deal,” anti-nuclear activist Ann Suellentrop said. “So arrogant and so dismissive of the public.”
Park officials said they could not inform the public because they were under nondisclosure agreements with Deep Fission and the Department of Energy. “You’ve got intellectual property that … they like to keep under wraps,” Reams said. “If you’re the DOE, it’s a national security risk. It’s an energy project that has national implications.” Zaleski concurred, arguing that the agreement with Deep Fission was a standard one. “That’s just how the cookie crumbles in this industry,” he said.
Holger Meyer, a particle physics professor at Wichita State University with a background in nuclear energy, said the public should have been informed regardless. “There sometimes are good reasons for the desire for nondisclosure agreements,” he said. “But this isn’t something that just impacts the land it is on. It impacts the entire county—the entire region.… There is obvious public interest.”
It didn’t matter. Five days later, park officials, executives of Deep Fission, a smattering of locals, and roughly 40 TV stations gathered in the park for a groundbreaking. Parsons may not have liked it, but it was going nuclear.
Founded three years ago, the California-based start-up Deep Fission was thrust into prominence last August, when its reactor project became one of 11 selected as part of Donald Trump’s “Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.” The pilot program, created by executive order, fast-tracks the companies’ ability to receive commercial operating licenses. The stated goal at the time was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026; one already has, and the DOE claims two more are on track. Deep Fission is not among them.
This rapid schedule is possible in part because Trump has overhauled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since the start of his second term, relaxing regulations and inspections to meet demand from data centers.
In May 2025, the president ordered the theoretically independent NRC to submit to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and cut the annual hours spent on nuclear inspections by an estimated 38 percent. Hundreds of staff members have since departed the agency, and the two remaining Democrats on its board have expressed fear they could be fired after Democratic Chair Christopher Hanson was canned last year. Suellentrop warned that the NRC will be “gutted” if Trump continues to get his way. “The DOE will rubber-stamp whatever he wants, and to hell with people’s safety, their health, the environment,” she said.
………………….For advocates of Deep Fission, the government’s promotion of the project is evidence of its safety.
But others warned against such implicit trust. Meyer said “industry interest” was behind the Trump administration’s embrace of nuclear power. “Environmental regulations are being dismantled in all areas,” he said. “It’s clear that nuclear safety isn’t prioritized by the Trump administration.” Kent Rowe, a retired professor of aeronautics and anti-nuclear activist from near Parsons, stated that the Deep Fission project was “a scheme to bury [reactors] haphazardly and worry about consequences later.”
A March letter signed by 11 state attorneys general condemned the DOE for creating an exemption allowing certain nuclear projects to skip previously mandated environmental reviews. Paul Gunter, director of the group Beyond Nuclear, said he was concerned the exemption would allow Deep Fission to bypass proper safety measures.
“There should be no question about whether or not a novel nuclear technology without a designed reactor containment system can avoid an environmental review for potential severe accidents and the long-term consequences,” he said. When asked whether Deep Fission would indeed be exempt from the review, a DOE spokesperson said, “No determination has been reached.”
While the other nuclear companies in Trump’s pilot program are working on more or less traditional reactors, Deep Fission is getting weird with it, forecasting a reactor it has described as both “discreet” and “bespoke.” A laudatory Forbes profile on company founders Richard and Liz Muller outlines the plan: “Drill a 30-inch-diameter borehole a mile into the earth, fill it with water, then insert a teeny-tiny nuclear reactor that will boil the water at the bottom and send it up a separate pipe to run a steam turbine. Each hole will generate 15 megawatts, enough to power 12,000 homes.” (The profile fails to note some less savory details from Richard’s past: He was a vocal global warming skeptic until 2012, and has been criticized for taking research funding from the oil and gas tycoon Charles Koch.)
A small, scalable reactor is Deep Fission’s Theranos-esque goal, perfect for supporting Silicon Valley’s new obsession: AI data centers. Seventy in-house reactors can power one data center, according to Forbes. Deep Fission has been open about a desire to “meet the explosive demand for power from artificial intelligence” with a system “designed to scale modularly.” They have already seduced the likes of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who owns an 8 percent stake in the company.
Speed is one of the company’s core tenets, which is concerning to some critics. Deep Fission’s website proudly states its reactors take an “estimated six months” to build, and the company told Parsons in December it aimed to have a test reactor running by July. “We have to build fast enough to meet data center demand before they decide to go with something else,” Liz Muller told Forbes.
It turns out, though, that building a nuclear reactor is quite difficult. The company now will not say when its test reactor will be ready, and is unsure on whether it will be able to open a commercial reactor at all. Deep Fission recently completed a test well in Parsons 6,000 feet deep and eight inches in diameter. That may sound impressive, but it’s far smaller than the mile-deep, 30 to 50 inch–wide borehole that will be needed for the real thing.
While a white paper sent to the NRC gives insight into the proposed reactor blueprint, Deep Fission’s design is not final yet. The company has not submitted a preliminary safety analysis to the DOE, nor applied for the NRC license it will need to sell energy, according to federal officials. Deep Fission declined to speak with The New Republic for this piece, with vice president of communications Chloe Frader citing the “active registration process.”
Reams said Deep Fission was never going to hit the deadline it set for itself. “I think even if it had gone perfectly, they probably wouldn’t have hit July 4,” he said. As to why the company may not be selling its energy anymore? “They weren’t sure [of] all the P’s and Q’s that they had to make sure were covered,” Reams said. “It’s been a learning process for them.”
…..some have been vocal in their opposition to Deep Fission, particularly Reynolds, who founded a local group called Prairie Dog Alliance for the express purpose of fighting the development. In a matter of months, Reynolds has assembled a hodgepodge of community members, among them farmers, business owners, activists, and professors. (Suellentrop, Meyer, Rowe, and Gunter have all been in contact with the group.) Prairie Dog Alliance now boasts over 500 Facebook followers and about 15 members who attend regular meetings.
Some locals say Prairie Dog represents the majority opinion. Librarian Heather Fouts estimated that “at most 25 percent” of residents support the nuclear project. “I would say most of Parsons is against the reactor,” echoed Beachner, who recently joined the group. “But I also feel … nobody believes they can do anything.” In contrast, Zaleski and Parsons Sun editor Hannah Emberton cast Prairie Dog as a vocal minority.
The group forced a public meeting with Deep Fission in March after rejecting private talks. There have been a handful of meetings since, but Prairie Dog still wants more transparency. Member Jill Blankinship said the March meeting was “turned into a meet-and-greet”; at a later May in-person meeting where company officials took questions, participants were made to write them down ahead of time. Deep Fission also promotes a “community advisory group” in Parsons, which has no public facing presence at the moment, though Deep Fission says has met twice.*
Deep Fission is also drilling its boreholes at the edge of the Roubidoux aquifer, an underground water source that’s part of the larger Ozark system. While Parsonites get their drinking water from nearby Lake Parsons, the Ozark system is used for commerce, farming, and rural water districts all over the shop. “If something did happen, there’s potential that it could contaminate groundwater, which then contaminates the Neosho River, which goes … all the way down to Oklahoma,” Blankinship said. “Thirty-six towns, all kinds of people.”…………..
There’s also the issue of nuclear waste. Deep Fission’s founders said in April they wanted to just abandon their spent fuel rods underground after each reactor’s six-year lifespan. “Instead of pulling them out of the hole, they’ll pour in a mix of cement and rock to seal it all in place,” the Forbes profile states happily. Activists called the idea dangerous.
A month after the Forbes piece, Deep Fission seemingly changed its tune. Chief Operating Officer Mike Brasel said in a May public meeting that the company will only leave spent fuel underground temporarily and that “we do not plan on disposing fuel down in that hole.” While the federal government is “contractually required to take the fuel,” Brasel said, Deep Fission aims to have a recycling or disposal facility in place before its boreholes begin to collapse in “40 to 50” years.
By then, things could already be going very wrong. Reynolds’s doomsday scenario is that radiation poisoning of the city’s soil and water will turn Parsons into something akin to Picher, Oklahoma, a small town 35 miles away. Once a bastion of lead and zinc mining, the town underwent dangerous corporate practices that caused irreconcilable environmental damage to the land; Picher was soon declared uninhabitable, and the municipality was officially dissolved in 2013.
In the event of a disaster, Deep Fission is seeking liability insurance under the Price-Anderson Act, which indemnifies the company in the event of a nuclear accident, providing costs fall above a certain threshold. “They’re going to … look for being indemnified from an accident that they’re saying will never happen,” Gunter said. “That’s a clear no-confidence vote.”…………………………………………………………..https://newrepublic.com/article/211643/nuclear-reactor-parsons-kansas-safety
Trump’s ‘nuclear bros’ race to deliver US atomic revival
At a factory in Texas, Matt Loszak is building a new type of nuclear reactor he
hopes will allow the US to reclaim leadership in an industry dominated by
Russia and China. “Our goal is to ship hundreds and possibly thousands of
reactors every year,” the 35-year-old founder of Aalo Atomics said as he
inspected components for the Aalo-X, designed to power AI data centres.
Aalo is one of several US start-ups planning to switch on new reactors this
month ahead of a July 4 deadline set by President Donald Trump to mark the
250th anniversary of America’s independence.
Antares Nuclear and Valar
Atomics have already announced they have achieved “criticality” — the
moment a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining. Radiant Nuclear
and Oklo told the FT they were in the final stages of receiving safety
clearances under Trump’s pilot programme, which aims to have at least
three test reactors reach criticality by the target date. Many of the
founders leading the charge are under 40 and come from outside the nuclear
industry, while some have ties to the Trump administration. Backed by
Silicon Valley, they say small reactors can help meet soaring electricity
demand from AI data centres.
FT 18th June 2026,
https://www.ft.com/content/0d074795-e54a-41d7-9c97-baf2bd6deb94
Can small nuclear reactors deliver for Europe?
SMR’s promise affordable, low-carbon nuclear power, but the continent will reap the benefits only if governments abandon piecemeal projects and deploy reactors at scale.
The Parlament Magazine, By Matej Tonin and Malwina Qvist, 11 June 26
Europe needs reliable, low-carbon power for its industries, cities and energy security and it will need even more in the coming decade. Small modular reactors are increasingly seen as part of the solution, but only if the European Union develops them as an industrial program rather than a series of scattered national experiments.
SMRs must be deployed as a fleet. Repetition can reduce costs and build the supply chains Europe needs. The next three years will determine whether Europe develops that capability itself or watches it emerge elsewhere.
The fleet logic
SMRs are often sold on the promise of being cheaper than large reactors. On a first-of-a-kind basis, they are not.
Their economics depend on something different: serial production.
An illustrative model by the EFI Foundation shows why: in a four-unit SMR order book, the fourth unit is around one-sixth cheaper than the first. The savings come from factory fabrication, standardized designs, established supply chains and the learning gained from each successive unit.
This has a policy implication. In the short term, no single European market will be able to anchor a fleet on its own. The order book needed to drive SMRs down their cost curve must be European in scale, otherwise large-scale deployment will remain out of reach.
The European Commission projects between 17 and 53 gigawatts of SMR capacity across the EU by 2050.
The range itself is telling: even the lower bound would require a serious industrial program; the upper bound would put Europe among the leaders in SMR deployment. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/oped-can-small-nuclear-reactors-deliver-lowcost-energy-for-europe
Space Force needs to prepare for an ‘in-person’ moon conflict with China, new report argues
Guardians need a human spaceflight program for future lunar missions, Mitchell Institute says.
Defense One, Thomas Novelly, 23 May 26,
The Space Force should prepare to put active-duty troops on the moon and on space stations to counter China’s lunar and military ambitions, a new research paper argues.
The Mitchell Institute’s paper, published Thursday, calls for the Space Force to prioritize the creation of a “human spaceflight” program and redefine federal, active-duty Title 10 orders to compete against China’s military-focused space initiatives—such as the reported goal of putting its Taikonauts on the moon by 2030. Although Chinese officials as recently as last month have said the country believes in the “peaceful use” of space, the paper claims future “competition for control of lunar resources and territory will likely reach a tipping point” and the U.S. military must be prepared.
With a potential ‘in person’ lunar conflict with China as the contextual touchstone, the U.S. must begin a pragmatic multi-decade effort, leveraging its Space Test Course (STC), as well as partnerships with NASA and commercial space companies, to deliver the skills, tools, and concepts needed for future Title 10 activities to enforce U.S. spacepower-enabling norms and standards,” the report said. “These efforts will require additional funding from Congress for both U.S. Space Force human spaceflight opportunities and residencies at commercial space stations.”
The 22-page policy report calls for blurring the long-standing boundaries between space exploration and militarized operations by allowing Title 10 active-duty federal orders to include “space and lunar habitation” and “warfighting authorities and a national defense mindset in the advancement of human spaceflight.” The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which the U.S. and China are parties to, calls for the governments to use the moon and other planets for “peaceful purposes” and forbids military bases, testing, and maneuvers. Kyle Pumroy, a retired Space Force colonel and the paper’s author, called for pushing back against those norms………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/05/space-force-needs-prepare-person-moon-conflict-china-new-report-argues/413747/
United Nations Open-ended working group on the prevention of an arms race in outer space in all its aspects (“OEWG on PAROS”)
Pursuant to General Assembly decision 79/512, the General Assembly decided to convene a new open-ended working group for the period 2025–2028, which would replace the two open-ended working groups established by resolutions 78/20 and 78/238.
The General Assembly decided to task the open-ended working group to submit recommendations on the prevention of an arms race in outer space in all its aspects, and that its discussions and recommendations would be informed by all the relevant General Assembly resolutions on the prevention of an arms race in outer space, including: (a) Resolution 78/20; and (b) Resolution 78/238.
Decision 79/512 decided that the Open-ended working group shall hold a two-day organizational session in Geneva in 2025, and shall meet in Geneva for two substantive sessions of five days each in 2025, two substantive sessions of five days each in 2026, two substantive sessions of five days each in 2027 and two substantive sessions of five days each in 2028.
Sessions
The organizational session of the Open-ended working group on the prevention of an arms race in outer space in all its aspects was held in Geneva from 6 to 7 February 2025 in Room XVIII at the Palais des Nations.
The first substantive session was held in Geneva from 7 to 11 April 2025 in Room XVIII of the Palais des Nations.
The second substantive session was held in Geneva from 21 to 25 July 2025 in Room XVII of the Palais des Nations.
The third substantive session will be held in Geneva from 6 to 10 July 2026 in Room XVI of the Palais des Nations.
The fourth substantive session will be held in Geneva from 23 to 27 November 2026 in Room XVI of the Palais des Nations.
Digital recordings of past public meetings are available here. Live audio streaming for public meetings of the open-ended working group may be found here.
Information for Participants…………………………………………………………………………. https://meetings.unoda.org/open-ended-working-group-on-prevention-of-an-arms-race-in-outer-space-2025
Is America ready for a nuclear explosion in space?
by Peter A. Garretson and Richard M. Harrison, – 06/09/26, https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5915315-space-based-nuclear-weapons/
Gen. Stephen Whiting, the commander of U.S. Space Command, recently made waves when he publicly discussed a major threat that America’s newest military branch recently war-gamed — that of an adversary detonating a nuclear weapon in space.
At first blush, the scenario seems far-fetched. In truth, though, it is a real possibility.
More than a year ago, in February 2024, House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) was already raising the alarm that Russia could place a space-based nuclear device into orbit. That possibility was later confirmed by the Pentagon.
The White House grasps the danger. A December 2025 Executive Order on Space Superiority directs the country’s relevant agencies to create “a space security strategy that accounts for United States interests in, from, and to space” and “a technology plan for detecting, characterizing, and countering potential adversary placement of nuclear weapons in space.” That strategy, moreover, is expected as soon as June 16.
This public call to action is notable. It marks the first time an unclassified document has publicly directed a response to a nuclear weapon in space. It also reflects the gravity of what is an increasingly plausible threat. After spending several months conducting a deep dive into this subject, we at the American Foreign Policy Council have come to the same ominous conclusions. Space-based nuclear weapons are a serious matter, and one that deserves the very highest level of national attention.
Talk of a nuclear detonation generally triggers visions of cities being destroyed and mushroom clouds. The effects differ when a detonation occurs at a high altitude. While explosions near space, or in space, may not have immediate destructive effects here on Earth, they can prove equally devastating. Even a relatively small nuclear device, detonated at the right place in low Earth orbit, would have a catastrophic impact on U.S. and allied interests.
That is because, while space itself is enormous, the vast majority of modern spacecraft (nearly 90 percent) are in low Earth orbit, most of them satellites. Both the American and the global economy rely on these systems for everything from the functioning of the Internet to aircraft navigation and ship tracking, at a cost of billions of dollars daily, and trillions annually.
Moreover, our intelligence agencies and the U.S. military rely extensively on satellites to detect the movement of adversary ships, aircraft and tanks; to track ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles; and to communicate with our overseas forces. And in the near future, advanced capabilities will allow the U.S. Space Force to globally track everything that moves in the skies or on the ground in real time, in addition to all weather across the entire globe.
A space-based nuclear explosion anywhere could be damaging, but one in low Earth orbit would be crippling. If a nuclear weapon were detonated above this range, in a medium, higher Earth or geostationary orbit, the blast effects would basically only destroy satellites within a few kilometers.
But a nuclear weapon detonated in low Earth orbit would be far more devastating, because it would interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. The resulting radiation would be so strong, it would basically destroy everything in low Earth orbit in under a week’s time — leaving more than 10,000 derelict satellites on intersecting orbits with no way to avoid each other. The resulting destruction would be massive. A nuclear detonation there would truly be a weapon of mass destruction.
Worse still, repopulating those space assets after a detonation would be extremely complicated. We lack a stockpile of military (or civilian) satellites that are radiation-hardened, that could serve as replacements for the dead ones in orbit. Nor do we have proven technology available for deployment in space to reduce the harsh radiation. Finally, we have not yet invested in the technologies that would allow us to build build the satellites needed to replenish low Earth orbit quickly and efficiently.
By next week, the Department of Defense and intelligence community should have an actionable plan to deal with this gargantuan problem — or at least the start of one. Congress needs to stand ready to resource it. Moreover, as we have recommended, it should catalyze investments in space traffic management models, commercial “what if” agreements, radiation remediation technology, radiation-hardened replenishment, and long-term investments in an in-space industrial base above the threat.
Putting such a plan in place is a necessary start. But it will necessitate political will and resolute action on the part of the U.S. government. Otherwise, we risk being left in the dark.
Peter A. Garretson is a senior fellow in defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, where Richard M. Harrison is vice president of operations. They are the authors of a new report on Space Nuclear Weapons.
AI to double data centre power and water consumption by 2030, UN researchers say
Data centres are expected to consume twice as much power and water by 2030
as they expand to meet the surge in demand from artificial intelligence,
U.N. researchers said on Wednesday. Unless governments heed the rising
environmental costs of AI, the rapid rollout could also strain scarce
land resources and create mountains of electronic waste, the United Nations
University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned in a report.
Reuters 3rd June 2026, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ai-double-data-centre-power-water-consumption-by-2030-un-researchers-say-2026-06-03/
The atomic clock is ticking.
Western countries build far more slowly, when they build at all. The Darlington SMR is one of only six in the entire Western Hemisphere to begin construction in the past 40 years. Of those, only two, located in the U.S., completed construction, both spectacularly late.
A nuclear project’s schedule and cost are inextricably linked: Any delay will eat into contingencies, and, if sustained, will blow budgets to smithereens. Moreover, delays compound the already daunting challenge of financing the project.
even within the nuclear industry, many doubt SMRs can offer sufficient advantages to attract orders; the results of the first SMR in a G7 country could settle the matter.
Will Canada’s first new nuclear reactor in decades be built on time? Here’s how an Ontario utility’s promises stack up against the numbers
Matthew McClearn, The Globe and Mail, June 4, 2026, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-nuclear-reactor-ontario-power-generation-utility/
The race to build Canada’s first new nuclear reactor in more than three decades has officially begun on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
In late April, the Ontario government announced that the foundation of the building that will house the reactor had been lifted to its final resting place, down a 35-metre-deep vertical shaft, by one of the world’s largest crawler cranes. The foundation weighed more than 950 tonnes – heavier than three Airbus A380s, the government said.
With that, a clock started ticking.
As far as Ontario Power Generation is concerned, the Darlington small modular reactor, or SMR, has been under construction for about a year now. But according to nuclear industry bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and Mycle Schneider Consulting, which compile data on nuclear projects globally, construction officially begins with the placing of concrete for the foundation of the reactor building.
OPG and its partners – including reactor developer GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, construction company Aecon Group Inc., and architect-engineer AtkinsRéalis Group Inc. – have just four years and seven months to complete construction and connect the reactor to the grid, as promised, by the end of 2030. Once built, the reactor could supply enough electricity to power 300,000 homes. It’s a crucial first step for Ontario’s energy plans, which envision building many more reactors in the coming years.
Nuclear plants join high-speed rail, large bridges and tunnels, hydroelectric dams (think Site C) and major IT initiatives (think the federal Phoenix payroll system) on the list of complex engineering works that are highly likely to suffer lengthy delays. They’re akin to the Olympics for project managers; by promising the SMR in less than five years, OPG has effectively promised a gold medal.
Don’t let the “small” moniker fool you: The Darlington SMR is no minor undertaking. Lately, as many as 1,500 workers have been on-site on a typical work day.
OPG’s lengthy task list includes building the first-ever BWRX-300 reactor, a robust containment building to house it, a control building which will include the main control room, and another structure to house the turbine generator. It must also complete support structures for the other three planned units. They include a water cooling system complete with underground tunnels, and a switchyard.
According to an analysis of data from Mycle Schneider Consulting by The Globe and Mail, few reactors have been built in less than five years in recent history.
The fortunes of corporate executives, politicians, suppliers and even the nuclear industry itself depend on whether OPG’s team can demonstrate they are as exceptional as their political masters claim.
Why would completing a reactor in five years be difficult?
Canada’s nuclear industry finished building its last nuclear power reactor more than three decades ago. The 25 Candu reactors that started construction between 1958 and 1985 took an average of slightly longer than seven years to bring into commercial operations. Many of those reactors have been refurbished, which has reinvigorated Ontario’s nuclear industry. Even so, many of the skills required to build a plant from scratch have atrophied.
The closest Canadian analogue to the Darlington SMR might be Douglas Point, the earliest attempt to construct a commercial nuclear power plant. When work began in 1960 in Tiverton, Ont., Canada had limited experience building nuclear plants. Just like Douglas Point, the Darlington SMR is essentially a prototype. Douglas Point’s 200-megawatt output placed it in the same class. It took 8½ years to build.
Canada’s fastest build was Pickering-3, running from late 1967 to early 1972. Those years spanned a period when Ontario hit its stride building multiple reactors, but shows tight timelines were achievable back then.
How long has it taken to build nuclear plants globally?
China dominates modern reactor construction: According to Mycle Schneider Consulting data, 44 of the 75 reactors that began construction worldwide since 2016 are there. Yet few Chinese reactors are delivered within five years.
Western countries build far more slowly, when they build at all. The Darlington SMR is one of only six in the entire Western Hemisphere to begin construction in the past 40 years. Of those, only two, located in the U.S., completed construction, both spectacularly late.
Boasting about modular construction techniques, American reactor developer Westinghouse promised it could build its AP1000 reactor in just 36 months. Four AP1000s eventually started construction in the U.S. in 2013. Two of them, Vogtle Units 3 and 4, took more than a decade each. The other two, V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3, in South Carolina, were abandoned after roughly four years; efforts to restart their construction are now under way.
The only reactor attempted in France so far this century, Flamanville-3, was planned to take a little more than four years. It took 17. The only two reactors started in the United Kingdom since 2016 were at the Hinkley Point station, Britain’s largest nuclear power site; they’re approaching 12 years and counting, still under construction.
Why are nuclear builds so frequently delayed?
Nuclear projects face delays for numerous reasons. But some cardinal sins occur regularly, such as proceeding without a complete set of detailed blueprints.
The two V.C. Summer units in South Carolina, for example, began construction when engineering designs were incomplete. Drawings often turned out to be not constructible, sending designs back to the drawing board. Those changes, in turn, led to more work for subcontractors, which provoked disputes over who’d pay the resulting costs. Any changes also had to be approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A report by Jean-Martin Folz, former head of French automaker Peugeot, found that construction at France’s Flamanville-3 also began without a complete set of validated plans. The result was that the plant’s design continuously changed during construction, and lots of work had to be redone.
Quality control is another common stumbling block. At Flamanville-3, Mr. Folz catalogued a wide range of defects including poor welds and badly-manufactured forged components. Defects can lead to a cycle of delays, rework and disputes.
Once delays start piling up, it’s hard to recover. At Flamanville, Mr. Folz noted that Électricité de France tried to accelerate work schedules to get back on track. That only led to other problems, leading to further rework and delays, not to mention overloaded and demoralized crews.
After years of poor performance, the construction of the Vogtle units in Georgia was placed under new management. Don Grace was an engineer hired by the Georgia Public Service Commission to evaluate the project’s progress. During testimony in 2022, he explained that the new proponents “prematurely” started testing equipment at the plant, even as construction continued.
The problem? Mr. Grace said it resulted in too many workers toiling alongside one another on compressed timetables – a problem dubbed “stacking of crafts.” That was exacerbated by management’s tendency to defer planned work to achieve near-term milestones that provided “an inaccurate impression of having made significant progress.”
Mr. Grace put it this way: “The scope of work for a new nuclear plant is so large, and how the proper scoping and sequencing of all the activities comes together is highly important.”
What’s behind OPG’s confidence?
OPG believes the BWRX-300, while being first of its kind, is the simplest-ever boiling water reactor, a mature American-designed technology. There are more than 100 of them operating worldwide, so many of its basic principles have been demonstrated before.
OPG also counts on modular construction techniques to speed things up. The Darlington SMR’s base mat is a good example: It is comprised of 56 sections that were manufactured off-site. Upon delivery to Darlington, they were welded together in a special building with a retractable roof, then lifted into place by crane. In theory, this should be more efficient than assembling a warren of rebar, erecting forms and then pouring huge volumes of concrete.
“Many components will be pre-assembled offsite into larger modules and lifted into place – such as skid-mounted systems and pre-assembled piping – reducing onsite duration and risk,” wrote OPG spokesperson Neal Kelly in a written response to questions.
OPG is also taking an off-the-shelf approach wherever possible. For example, the plant’s turbine and generator are to be the same standard units already proven in natural gas plants.
And OPG is using what it calls an “integrated project delivery contract model,” which it says will encourage partners to collaborate, share risks and rewards, and maximize efficiency. Previous nuclear projects have demonstrated that how contracts are written, and how the various stakeholders work together, matters a great deal – especially when unforeseen challenges arise.
Of note, Mr. Kelly wrote that the plant’s design was completed in December.
What’s at stake?
Most immediately, the fate of the Darlington SMR. A nuclear project’s schedule and cost are inextricably linked: Any delay will eat into contingencies, and, if sustained, will blow budgets to smithereens. Moreover, delays compound the already daunting challenge of financing the project: Owners must wait that much longer to start earning revenue by generating electricity.
A nuclear project’s schedule and cost are inextricably linked: Any delay will eat into contingencies, and, if sustained, will blow budgets to smithereens. Moreover, delays compound the already daunting challenge of financing the project: Owners must wait that much longer to start earning revenue by generating electricity.
Though contracts haven’t been signed yet, Ontario has already committed to build three more BWRX-300s. Its existing nuclear plants all have four identical reactors, an approach that has demonstrated significant benefits. An $8-billion one-off lemon would be a costly miss.
The Darlington SMR is the signature project of Nicole Butcher, who assumed OPG’s top job in early 2025. Ontario Energy Minister Stephen Lecce, who approved it, has bet heavily on OPG’s prowess, insisting the utility stands alone in building on-time and on-budget.
Mr. Lecce’s entire vision for Ontario’s electricity hinges on that statement being true. His plan involves a major expansion of nuclear power, in which the SMR would be followed by two much larger projects, the combined cost of which would likely be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Failure to deliver the comparatively modest Darlington SMR might compel a rethink.
Similarly, the federal government has invested considerable political and financial capital in SMRs. Yet of all the research clusters and demonstration units promised over the past decade, the Darlington SMR is just about the only one still standing. Ottawa has provided billions of dollars in financing, thus becoming a substantial minority owner in the project, and referred it to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new Major Projects Office.
Other utilities around the world have expressed interest in building their own BWRX-300s. More than 100 Canadian companies have signed agreements to provide components and services for the Darlington SMR; successful delivery could lead to contracts if global utilities feel bold enough to build their own.
SMRs represent a promising but untested approach to manufacturing reactors – one that emphasizes simplification and mass production. Whereas large reactors are purchased almost exclusively by resource-rich utilities, SMRs are marketed as being cheaper and quicker to build – and thus suitable for a broader range of customers. Yet even within the nuclear industry, many doubt SMRs can offer sufficient advantages to attract orders; the results of the first SMR in a G7 country could settle the matter.
And that’s why the Darlington SMR is one of the most important nuclear projects worldwide.
No pressure.
‘What’s happening is horrifying’: the rebel film-maker challenging AI’s march into Hollywood
While pro-Silicon Valley documentaries got major distribution deals, Valerie Veatch had to struggle to get her film, about Big Tech’s dark past and future, into the world. She talked to Charlotte O’Sullivan about what some attendees called ‘the scariest movie playing at Sundance’
Charlotte O’Sullivan, Jun 6, 2026, https://www.thenerve.news/p/valerie-veatch-interview-ghost-in-the-machine-documentary-ai-sundance-tech-bros?utm_source=www.thenerve.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=weekend-edition-gagged-facebook-s-whistleblower-james-mcavoy-q-a-nilufer-yanya&_bhlid=9a5a1970bb01aaa89602f0fb01add0f7ae856b22
Valerie Veatch doesn’t want to come across as “a crazy, bitter film-maker”. But she admits it’s “triggering” to talk about the challenges she faced when making Ghost in the Machine, her blisteringly enjoyable documentary about the dark past and present of AI, which hits UK cinemas today.
From the start, Ghost in the Machine was a hard sell. As Veatch says: “I couldn’t get funding from the usual places. People weren’t interested in a film that was tech-critical.” She wanted to talk about the “father of Silicon Valley”, Dr William Shockley, and his abiding interest in eugenics, to explore the sexism and racism that underpins “breathless, gushy” discussions about “superintelligence” and the “singularity” (the hypothetical moment when AI surpasses human intelligence). “I was so full of rage. This stuff is not inevitable.”
Veatch, who was born in Seattle but is now based in Kent, has made three critically acclaimed and zeitgeisty documentaries (including 2014’s Love Child and Me at the Zoo in 2012). For the new film, she talked to more than 30 US experts about the power dynamics behind the much-hyped, eye-wateringly lucrative AI revolution. She did the Zooms, and edited the Zooms, “compulsively, in the middle of the night, for a year; I did urgent listening and, somehow, I got a cut ready for Sundance”. Once Sundance 2026 accepted the film, Veatch got a grant, which paid for all the archival footage. And her dad and aunt came in as investors, she says proudly. “So this is an almost entirely homegrown film. I don’t think we could carry the message that we’re carrying if we were at all beholden to any large studio or distribution company.”
‘What is the difference between being in the pocket of Big Tech and being an independent voice? Well, a lot!’
Irreverence is Veatch’s thing and she cites the British director Adam Curtis as the biggest influence on her work (“I wanted to utilise the archive, the way he does … I wanted it to be surreal and sardonic”). Ghost in the Machine is crammed with jolting images: we see William Shockley, on TV, spewing his racist poison with the gentle patience of a man hawking encyclopaedias. Elsewhere, phrases chime in quietly chilling ways: the Victorian originator of eugenics, Francis Galton, wants to create a “galaxy of genius”.
Also shown at Sundance this year, and distributed by the mainstream giant Focus Features in the US (and Universal Studios elsewhere), was The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Made by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, this documentary, as its title suggests, manifests a cautious lack of pessimism on the subject of AI. Framed as a personal journey (Roher, about to become a father, wants to know if he’s bringing his baby into a safe world), it suggests this technology will always be with us. This film, which premieres at Sheffield DocFest next Friday, 12 June, and then goes on general release in the UK on 19 June, had the cooperation of the tech bros and includes on-camera interviews with Google Deepmind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. In the words of Daniela Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, “this train isn’t going to stop”.
Veatch draws my attention to the fact that Sundance now receives funding from Google, adding: “Last year, so I’m told, audiences clapped when film-makers said their movies didn’t contain AI … this year was so different.” Even before the festival began, she sensed unease about her project. As it happened, Ghost in the Machine connected with audiences. In fact, it was a huge success, with word of mouth suggesting it was “the scariest movie playing at Sundance”.
Still, Veatch gets infuriated when her film is compared to Roher’s. She says: “What is the difference, ultimately, between being in the pocket of Big Tech and being an independent voice? Well, a lot!”
Author and linguist Emily Bender (who appears in both Ghost in the Machine and The AI Doc) is on record as saying Veatch’s film is the better of the two. Bender says Roher “lets himself get buffeted by the imaginations of some of the most unhinged people in this space”, whereas Bender feels Veatch has “woven together an informed and engrossing essay”. Similarly, Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and cofounder of Black in AI, who also shows up in both films, recently praised Ghost in the Machine while distancing herself from Roher’s movie. “She went on LinkedIn and said: “I reject [The AI Doc]. They used us like chocolate chips.’” Veatch nods grimly. “And they did. They sprinkled in diversity.”
‘This industry is rotten. I hate it! But this is why we need women film-makers’
Veatch insists this isn’t about individual movies getting it wrong. It’s about a trend to sideline or erase voices with a different point of view. A new British production called AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, is showing at Tribeca this weekend. Veatch says she only heard about the movie through Bender, who was interviewed for it but didn’t make the final cut. The film-maker said something like: “Sorry we didn’t use your footage. In the end, we were just focusing on people who were in the room when big discoveries happened.” Veatch pulls a face. “In other words, ‘we focused on men’. This industry is rotten. I hate it! But this is why we need women film-makers.”
Veatch says repeatedly that she feels the need to be “aggressive” when talking about her film. That she’s willing to seem “negative”, because “what’s happening with AI is so urgent – the building of all these hyper-scale data centres is horrifying.” In the US, she says, “they’re trying to criminalise dissent”. (Wired recently reported that federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are targeting “anti-technology extremists”). Veatch jiggles in her seat. “The film’s going to get a release on PBS and YouTube in September. And we’re about to get a huge grant, to make data centres the theme of our summer push, in the US. I’ve invited Erin Brockovich [the environmental activist, who has started a database to track data centres around America] to one of our events. I’m like: “I really hope she says yes. She’s an icon. You can’t criminalise Erin Brockovich!”
Veatch says she’d “love to do something in the UK about data centres”, then pauses and, for the first and only time in the whole interview, sounds lost. She murmurs, “There are networks in the US. I don’t know anyone here …” Human contact means everything to Veatch. Concerned citizens of the UK, if you want to join forces with this formidable woman, drop her a line.
Ghost in the Machine is released in UK cinemas today, or can be rented through Kinema
The Nerve is a fearless, independent media title launched by five former Guardian / Observer journalists: investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter and creative director Lynsey Irvine. We cover culture, politics and tech,
A safer nuclear fuel is gaining steam — but cost remains a hurdle
New U.S. regulations and a wave of startup interest are breathing new life into TRISO-fueled reactors, which have struggled to take off due to high fuel costs.
Canary Media, By Alexander C. Kaufman, 2 June 2026
As the U.S. looks to revive its stagnant nuclear industry, a group of companies is racing to realize the promise of a “meltdown-proof” fuel that for decades has struggled to progress beyond federal lab experiments.
Tri-structural isotropic fuel, known as TRISO, is safer and more stable than the fuel rods used by the large-scale water-cooled reactors that make up the vast majority of the world’s nuclear power plants. Both fuel sources use enriched uranium, but in TRISO, the element is balled into poppyseed-sized spheres with ceramic coating that can absorb dangerous radioactive materials.
The hitch is the cost: TRISO is orders of magnitude more expensive than conventional assemblies of low-enriched uranium. Given that hefty price tag, only a few TRISO-fueled reactors have ever been built worldwide, even though the technology has existed for years and the world is hungry for nuclear projects that promise to avoid the worst accidents of the past…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Companies looking to go the route of microreactors and small modular reactors, however, face not only the challenges that plague large-scale reactors, such as pushback over radioactive waste and costly fuel sources, but new ones, too. For TRISO, those challenges are cost and an immature supply chain — plus the fact that the fuel’s performance remains largely untested at any commercial scale……………………………………https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/safer-nuclear-fuel-gaining-steam
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Heralds a Post-human Era of Economic, Social and even Moral Upheavals
By Rodrigue Tremblay, 1 June 26
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have.“
Eric Schmidt (1955- ), former Google CEO, in a keynote address to University of Arizona graduates, that was booed by students, Friday, May 15, 2026.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire.“
Sundar Pichai (1972- ), Chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. and of its subsidiary Google. (Statement made in 2018, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland).
“The development of full Artificial Intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race… it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.“
Stephen Hawking (1942- 2018),British physicist, in an interview with the BBC, December 2, 2014.
“Any technology that facilitates attackswithout seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.”
Pope Leo XIV (1955- ), in his first encyclical ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (or Magnificent Humanity), May 25, 2026.
The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and of work-automation is progressing rapidly with many potential applications and benefits in many areas. It is going to define the economic future.
However, there are important risk, threats and disruptions that could result from a blind and too-rapid adoption of all the features of the new technology. Its ‘creative destruction’ could become increasingly powerful and detrimental, especially for workers, but also for writers and artists, for businesses and, finally, for the entire economy and society.
In the emerging post-human world, humanity could face unprecedented challenges in an economic context where humans are no longer the primary focus. (There is already a growing market for NEO humanoid robots to be used in a variety of ways!)
The world could see some economic sectors where humans are relegated to a secondary role and even completely sidelined. For this reason, AI brings about technological transformations, but a number of these will drastically alter living standards and influence how humans perceive work, income, and life in society.
For the present, the fast-growing robotic technology is making work more productive and more complex in many industries, which could increase economic growth. Furthermore, a surge in investment in data centers and electric power plants is also likely to stimulate economic growth.
For workers, however, AI is replacing more routine white-collar low-skill and freelance work in numerous sectors, although there are other areas where special skill work would be more AI-proof.
Therefore, the question must be raised: In this post-work world, when many jobs are disappearing because of increasing uses of AI, where will future effective demand and incomes come from to maintain living standards? Indeed, if work and earnings for many categories of workers disappear, this does not bode well for the future macro economy.
That is why governments will have to think about how to deal with the coming phenomenon of AI-driven unemployment and possibly of sub-employment, especially for young workers who may face a future of dead-end jobs. Governments will also have to establish the levels of taxation and regulation required to avoid the worst excesses.
I- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the economy
On the one hand, we are already experiencing the effects of the futuristic generative Artificial Intelligence AI technology and software engineering on the economy, in terms of a rise in business profitability for some firms and individuals and organizations.
In this brave new world of the future, important disruptions in labor markets and in the overall macro economies can be expected.
This is likely to generate important transfers of wealth between groups of people, as some segments of society get richer while others get poorer. Investors and workers in the new tech sectors will greatly benefit. However, experienced workers hit by tech-driven layoffs are going to suffer a setback in their earnings growth, while young workers entering the labor force may have fewer opportunities. indeed, studies show that young adult graduates have begun finding it more difficult to find entry-level employment.
Since 1750, there have been four industrial revolutions and technological and scientific innovations that transformed economies from predominantly agricultural and artisanal ones into increasingly urbanized and more complex advanced commercial and industrial economies.
II- Past Industrial Revolutions……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
III- The first industrial revolution was difficult for workers, but the second and third ones created enough new industries to incorporate an increased workforce.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
IV- The Fourth Industrial Revolution could create permanent unemployment and underemployment………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
V- Could Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) pose a risk to humanity?
In the not-too-distant future, advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), such as the algorithms of Anthropic—which would be capable of equaling or even surpassing human intelligence and overriding human judgment and common sense—could pose a serious threat to humanity. This could certainly be the case, especially if these technologies were to fall into the wrong hands, both within and outside governments.
Indeed, unlike past technological advancements, from the printing press and steam engines to electricity and computers, humans have always maintained control over such innovations. This would not necessarily be the case with GAI, because decision-making with GAI could one day be autonomous, and no longer be in human hands………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Some impersonal and totally amoral AI models playing wargames can go as far as to simulate the launching of nuclear weapons on another country, when nuclear-armed countries are involved in a war standoff. This could be cause for alarm when only ‘efficiency’ outcomes are considered by such models, irrespective of any lawful and moral considerations. This could lead to human disasters and atrocities.
The mere fact that such possibilities exist should dictate a cautious approach to advanced developments in generative AI and AGI. Before we truly enter an era of human obsolescence and the domination of autonomous artificial intelligence agents, it would be wise to consider the consequences for humanity and how to manage them.
Conclusion
A new age of ‘Robber Barons is unfolding under our very eyes, where important private companies make large-scale layoffs and increasingly rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to partially offload their social responsibility to recruit, to hire and train people, while raking in large profits.
In the medium and longer run, entire categories of workers could become economically unemployable in the eyes of employers, and this will affect the entire population and the overall economy. The replacement of humans by intelligent robots in many fields of activity will be a factor of alienation for a large part of the population……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://rodriguetremblay100.blogspot.com/2026/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-heralds-post.html
Cory Doctorow: Hell is other people – so billionaires are using AI to replace them.
The tech elite are pouring billions into dispensing with inconvenient humans. Now governments want the same trick to wish away the migrants their economies desperately need, writes the author and Nerve columnist
Cory Doctorow, Jun 3, 2026, https://www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-column-ai-inconvenient-humans-billionaires-sam-altman-bezoz-migrants?utm_source=www.thenerve.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=tuesday-edition-philippa-perry-on-the-snp-shopping-scandal-maggie-o-farrell-q-a-hotlist&_bhlid=4cd32062ee3b87b8a967b812dc04a58521f29a66
I don’t care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible – quite the opposite! Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn.
From boardgames to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas to construction projects, there’s so much important, enjoyable and essential stuff you can’t do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities.
Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. We evolved social structures – laws, teams, governments, families, bureaucracies – to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things. These structures are imperfect, but they’re better than the alternative: coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to forcing others to bend to your will, “persuasion” is the hands-down favourite.
Not for everyone, though. There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than yours. We call most of those people “toddlers” and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief.
But there’s another group of people who carry this belief into adulthood. If they’re of regular means, we call those people “bullies”. However, if they’re sufficiently wealthy, we call them “billionaires”.
Just lately though, we’ve come up with a new solution to the problem of hell being other people. Rather than coercing other people into arranging their affairs to suit our needs, we’ve devoted trillions of dollars to replacing people with pliant chatbots, in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether.
No surprise, then, that billionaires were easy targets for AI hustlers, who promised the possibility of a world without people, where an army of “agents” could do the jobs that presently demand the contributions of unreasonable human beings who refuse to acknowledge that your priorities trump theirs.
Jeff Bezos built the world’s most advanced automated warehouses, and the workers in those warehouses are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate. The automation and the injuries aren’t unrelated facts. The inhumane treatment is caused by the automation, because when you commit hundreds of billions to automation capex, you need to work those assets to recoup the investment. In a human/machine collaboration, humans will always be the bottlenecks. To maximize return on automation, you need to drive the human peripherals that serve the machines at the absolute limit of human endurance. Jeff Bezos’s machines don’t just use humans, they use them up.
AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine, or a language in your sacred soil
Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on-platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason you’re stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and thus suboptimal. They unreasonably refuse to leave Facebook with you and follow you to another platform (this is bad for you, but good for Zuck), but they also refuse to organise their social media lives to “maximise your engagement” and thus the number of ads you see (which is bad for Zuck). By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socialising.
It’s not just industry. Politicians presiding over aging, declining nations whose most ardent voters have been convinced that migrants are a threat to their nation (rather than its salvation) face an impossible bind.
Objectively speaking, the only way that a rich country with an aging workforce can remain wealthy and powerful is by wooing working-age people from elsewhere to migrate to that country. Even if every tradwife is kept in a state of continuous gestation courtesy of a fertility-obsessed natalist, there’s still going to be decades during which your wealthy, aging population will need young, skilled people to do all the essential labour. From picking crops, to staffing hospitals, to building homes, to filing lawsuits, to preparing tax returns, your quiverfull child army will be too young to take over for years to come.
For these politicians, AI offers a way out of their double-bind. If migrants can be replaced with AI, then you can satisfy the racist sadism of your most ardent voters without shutting down the country for lack of workers. In feeding the fantasy of a world without people, AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants. Unlike gastarbeiter, bracero fruit-pickers or Saudi quasi-slaves, AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine, or a language in your sacred soil.
The wealthy have always dreamed of transforming the proletariat into the precariat: desperate workers who do as they’re told. But in the automation story of which AI is the latest chapter (and purportedly the climax), the precariat becomes the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporised or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored.
In the fantasy world of total automation, the owners of AI can make the world go around without any of us, which means that we will exist solely at their sufferance, and will therefore have to act like the non-player characters they half-believe we are already, organising everything we do around their priorities.
This is the foundation of Sam Altman’s obsession with a biometrically controlled universal basic income. Altman can’t stop fantasising about a world in which all the productive work is done by his software, and the state’s sole purpose is to supply us – the unnecessariat – with vouchers we can only redeem for services provided by Altman’s robot army. It’s charter schools for everything, with Altman at the top, all wrapped up in a layer of dystopian retinal scanning.
It all makes perfect sense – provided you don’t believe that other people are really, truly real.
This is an edited version of a Cory Doctorow post from pluralistic.net. It is published under a CC BY 4.0 creative commons licence
Cory Doctorow, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Los Angeles and London, is the Nerve’s tech columnist. His most recent book Enshittification is published by Verso
Donald Trump Is Going Nuclear
He envisions hundreds of reactors rolling off Valar’s assembly line every year, populating huge groupings of reactors that Valar calls “gigasites,” and possibly, at some point in the future, being installed on Martian soil. The primary obstacle standing in the way of such a future, he explained to me, was the “regulatory matrix.”
Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
“It’s one thing to challenge the status quo and try to innovate,” said Scott Morris, the former number two at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It’s another to try to go behind closed doors and blow the whole thing up.”
Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
significant piece of Valar’s safety case is its choice of fuel. Called TRISO (for “tristructural isotopic”), the fuel is fabricated so that every uranium particle is encased in a ceramic coating that can withstand extremely high heat and will contain within it nearly all the radioactive fission products that are created as the uranium starts splitting. ………….. The big downsides are that TRISO is expensive to make, and there is very little available. Valar was planning to manufacture its own on-site, but that facility was nothing more than a patch of concrete when I saw it.
As the president explodes the nuclear energy regulatory landscape, hungry startups like Valar Atomics are racing to build new reactors as quickly as possible. But speed comes at what cost?
Colin Jones, The New Republic, May 26, 2026
At 27 years old, with a baby face and a receding hairline, Isaiah Taylor looks like nothing so much as a very large cherub. After dropping out of high school, he launched into entrepreneurship; he has described himself in his professional bio as a “self-taught engineer and 3x founder.” The first two companies were an auto repair shop in northern Idaho and a software system to allow auto repair shops to track the condition of their customers’ vehicles. The third was a nuclear energy startup, Valar Atomics, with hundreds of millions in capital, a factory in El Segundo, California, and a very active social media presence. (Taylor tweets regularly: pictures of him smiling next to the red Tesla that Trump bought from Elon Musk before their falling-out; paeans to God, “the empire,” and “Western civilization”; and more scattered thoughts, like gratitude for a national nuclear laboratory: “Fizz fizz. Fizz fizz. Uranium so good! Thank you Oak Ridge!”)
Taylor founded Valar in 2023. He has said he pitched his company to some 80 different venture capital firms before Stephen Marcus of Riot Ventures gave him his first investment. That was, frankly, a crazy bet: Taylor was only 24 years old and had no real connection to the nuclear industry, apart from a paper brief on his vision. Last year, the bet paid off. In February, Valar announced it had raised $19 million in seed funding and unveiled its first reactor prototype. Then, on May 23, Donald Trump issued four executive orders that have transformed the U.S. nuclear industry. These called for new public subsidies across the entire sector—from enrichment to plant construction to the disposal of radioactive waste. Crucially for startups like Valar, the executive orders also outlined regulatory transformations that would allow companies to build small reactors, load them with fuel, and turn them on without having to go through the painstaking licensing process of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As news of Trump’s orders broke, Taylor published a manifesto heaping praise on them. (“There’s a new arm to national nuclear security: Dominance. Dominance in civilian nuclear technology development, dominance in nuclear energy infrastructure deployment, dominance in shaping global development.”) The same day, Taylor went live on Bloomberg TV. Alongside Utah Governor Spencer Cox, the young CEO announced that Valar had signed a deal with the state to build an advanced reactor there that would be operational by July 4, 2026. “That’s what the president has asked for,” said Cox. “It’s absolutely possible that we can do that.”
The timeline is immensely ambitious. In a 2021 study (from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, actually), researchers looked at how long it took to build over 500 advanced research reactors “from first concrete pour to criticality” with appropriate safeguards. They found that a majority had taken at least a year to build, with the average time being 32 months. Valar, as well as a handful of other companies selected for the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, are attempting to do the same thing in a fraction of the time. The DOE maintains that three companies are on track to turn something on by the president’s deadline, although it is cagey about which companies exactly. Valar is gunning to be one of them.
Some critics have questioned the wisdom and purpose of this breakneck sprint. Paul Dickman, a retired senior policy fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and an adviser to the Japanese government on the decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex, called it “bullshit” when I spoke with him. “I always tell people I don’t need to wait until July Fourth. I can do it tomorrow. I’m gonna go down to PetSmart and get myself a fish tank. I get myself a California source and a piece of fuel and I’ll have criticality tomorrow,” he said. “Of course I have a lot of dead fish floating around my fish tank, but that’s OK, you know.”
Others have pointed out that the United States has no long-term solution for waste disposal. Or that major questions hang over the economic viability of the small modular reactors most of these companies are building. Or that the reforms Trump has enacted at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission look like regulatory capture. Even further afield, there are those who view the current bipartisan enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a pernicious distraction, given that almost none of these reactors will come online soon enough to service the data-center boom or affect global carbon output in time to evade catastrophic climate change. “The first thing to understand is there isn’t much of a there there,” Allison Macfarlane, director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and former chair of the NRC, told me. “None of these things exist, OK. You can’t go and buy one and have it built tomorrow or even probably 10 years from now. So that’s the reality.”
Thus far these voices have been little more than a distant chorus to the forward march of industry. Asked recently what success looks like for the NRC, Ho Nieh, whom Trump appointed as NRC chair in January, replied, “Shovels in the ground.”
I first spoke with Taylor in summer 2025, a few weeks after Trump’s executive orders were announced. He popped up on my computer screen seated in a rattan chair and ready to give me his pitch. “Most of the time when we’re talking about building reactors, these are like five- to 10-year research projects, which maybe happen, maybe don’t,” he said. “And my whole philosophy in starting the company was like, we have to start moving faster as a country.” China, which had started building out a major domestic nuclear industry only this century, was on pace to overtake the United States in nuclear energy generation within a matter of years. It would require “a massive leap” to catch up. He thought Valar could do it.
Part of the reason I had been interested in Taylor and Valar was that they were such outliers in the field. Taylor has a great-grandfather who worked on the Manhattan Project, but his childhood was spent following his own dad from state to state as he chased white-collar sales work and the like. He says he grew up on food stamps. Their car was once stolen by a family friend, whom they confronted and forgave. I found these details immensely sympathetic when I heard Taylor relate them in an unusually personal interview he gave to the podcaster Shawn Ryan. I felt the same way hearing Taylor speak about his mother’s intelligence and how she used to discuss physics with him when he was a child.
All this cut against some other salient facts of Taylor’s life, which reporters in Salt Lake had been writing about of late, after his company announced it would build a nuclear reactor in their state. Like our secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, Taylor is a member of Christ Church, an institution that was founded and is still run by a pastor named Doug Wilson. Wilson wants an America in which non-Christians would be barred from public office. In a tweet about Wilson, Taylor said he appreciates the pastor’s teaching on “Christian wealth.” For Taylor, that not only means money, but also friends and family and other forms of wealth, although money is a big piece of it. (“Certain exceptions aside, participating in the system of wealth creation is simply blessing your neighbor at scale.”)
More directly related to what Valar was attempting, Taylor had erroneously claimed in a press release posted to X that you could hold spent fuel from his reactor after it had been removed. (“Nuclear engineer here. This statement cannot possibly be true,” Nick Touran, a prominent nuclear commentator and indeed a nuclear engineer, replied to the tweet. Fuel from the kind of reactor Taylor was talking about “would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful.”) And there was the unfortunate fact that in 2023, months after Taylor founded Valar, his friend and director of business operations, Elijah Froh, had sued Taylor’s other friend and head of operations, Kip Mock, for pouring diesel in a wood-burning stove and inadvertently setting Elijah on fire.
When Taylor and I talked, we focused on his criticisms of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Like most leading nuclear startups today, Valar is pursuing a small modular reactor, or SMR. Its chosen design is cooled with helium gas, and Taylor has called it “the Toyota Camry” of nuclear reactors. (That has to be understood as a proleptic description, as there is currently only one commercial version of such a reactor in operation in the world, and it is in Shandong, China). Also like most of its competitors, Valar has a business model that leans heavily on the notion that it will build its reactors in a factory. For years now, analysts have suggested that bringing construction inside a factory could help avoid the cost and schedule overruns for which the nuclear industry has become notorious. There is the tantalizing likelihood, too, that repeated construction will yield major efficiency gains, as mass production has tended to do for most products. Taylor is particularly captivated by these prospects. He envisions hundreds of reactors rolling off Valar’s assembly line every year, populating huge groupings of reactors that Valar calls “gigasites,” and possibly, at some point in the future, being installed on Martian soil. The primary obstacle standing in the way of such a future, he explained to me, was the “regulatory matrix.”
In April 2025, Valar had joined two other nuclear startups and the states of Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Arizona, and Florida as a plaintiff in a complaint against the NRC. Their case hinged on the claim that the small modular reactors that Valar and other companies planned to build posed “no meaningful risk to ‘the health and safety of the public.’” Because of that, the plaintiff’s lawyer argued, these reactors did not fall under NRC oversight. There was some exegesis of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 involved, but in the main, the suit was asking a judge to adjudicate the basic safety of a broad category of nuclear reactors. To me, the whole thing seemed insane on its face. A report from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity also points out the risk of a “fifty-state patchwork of separate licensing regimes” if regulatory authority were taken from the federal government. But working on the rough heuristic that the Supreme Court had systematically undercut the authority of federal regulators over the past half decade, and that the suit against the NRC was being heard by a member of the Federalist Society, I reckoned Valar and its co-plaintiffs had a reasonable chance of success.
Early in our call, Taylor wanted to show me a chart. “So this is the cumulative U.S. nuclear construction permits over time with Three Mile Island drawn in,” he said. What that looked like on the page was a yellow line ramping upward at a healthy rate from 1955 until 1979, where it was bisected by a vertical red line marking what for Taylor was a diluvian event. That year, in March, a broken valve in the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant precipitated a partial meltdown of the core and the release of a plume of radioactive fission products into the surrounding area. No deaths were directly linked to the disaster, but the U.S. nuclear industry never recovered. On Taylor’s chart, the yellow line effectively flatlined after this point.
There are a host of competing interpretations of exactly what went wrong with the nuclear industry over the 1970s. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
In the past decade or so, though, it has become more common to see arguments that lay the blame at the foot of the NRC. Take, for example, “It’s the Regulation, Stupid,” a 2024 essay from Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute……………………………………………………………………
Taylor shares the deregulatory impulse that lately goes under the slogan of abundance. His lawsuit against the NRC originated with the Abundance Institute and a former Chicago University law professor who, with financial support from the Koch brothers, had created an investment firm dedicated to “regulatory entrepreneurship.”…………………………………………………………………..
The bedrock of all this is his conviction that he should be able to build a reactor and test it without significant interference from the government……………………………………………………………………………………..
“I’ve said to people, an awful lot of what’s currently happening at the NRC feels like an Oklo revenge tour,” one former government official with knowledge of these events said to me. In 2020, Oklo Inc. was the first company to apply to the NRC for a construction permit to build an advanced reactor, or one that is not cooled with water. After two years of acrimonious back and forth, during which Oklo’s application never moved beyond the preliminary review, the NRC sent the company a letter informing it that its application had been rejected. The agency cited Oklo’s failure to provide “detailed technical information responsive to the staff’s requests for details about the safety of [Oklo’s] design.” Oklo’s CEO, Jacob DeWitte, has accused the NRC of screwing up. The executive orders that Trump signed on May 23 last year took Oklo’s side. “Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion,” reads the second of the four. The same order goes on to call for a “wholesale revision” of the NRC……………………………………………………………….
Beginning in June, DOGE staff and the president also began implementing more direct forms of control. On the 16th, Trump fired Christopher Hanson, a Democratic appointee and the former chair of the NRC’s five-person commission. A steering committee was then stood up and staffed with DOGE affiliates to implement Trump’s executive orders, including the rewriting of the agency’s rules.
So far, their recommendations have suggested changing environmental-impact reviews, cutting the number of inspections for operating plants, allowing nuclear workers to sustain higher doses of radiation, and sunsetting the NRC’s aircraft impact assessment, which requires nuclear power plants to demonstrate that a large plane crashing into the reactor would not produce to a major release of radioactivity. ………………………………………………… . In a recent ProPublica article, a young DOE lawyer who had entered government through DOGE, Seth Cohen, is reported to have commented during an internal meeting: “Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do.”…………………………………………………….
“It’s one thing to challenge the status quo and try to innovate,” said Scott Morris, the former number two at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It’s another to try to go behind closed doors and blow the whole thing up.”
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Securing a plot at San Rafael let Taylor announce plans to build a test reactor on the same day that the executive orders were announced. From there, things just kept falling into place for him and his company. In August, Valar was selected as one of 10 companies to take part in the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program. That gave it preference for fuel allotment and a fast track to regulatory approval for its test reactor through the DOE.
All companies in the pilot program benefited from the same structure, but Valar appears to have enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the former DOGE staffers who were spearheading reforms at the NRC. Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
…………………………………………………………………………………….. The real lift for Valar came in November, however, with a Series A funding round led by Snowpoint Ventures, Dream Ventures, and Day One Ventures. (Snowpoint is a major firm founded by a former head of global defense at Palantir. Dream Ventures is a bit of a cypher; it has a website with a logo in one corner and the words “Investing in Extraordinary Dreamers” displayed prominently, with no other information.
Day One Ventures was founded by Masha Drokova, an émigré who was a high-ranking member of Russia’s nationalist youth movement, Nashi, before becoming disenchanted with Vladimir Putin. In the States, she got her start in venture capital while working as Jeffrey Epstein’s publicist from 2017 to 2019. When I asked Valar’s director of communication about Drokova, I was told that she’s not on the board.) The funding round brought in $130 million, much of it from Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, as well as from Palmer Luckey, the founder and head of the defense company Anduril Industries. (I wrote to both of them asking to speak about their choice to invest in Valar and received a polite no from each.) With that money, Valar had more than enough to build its experimental reactor in Utah. As a first step, it brought its reactor core critical at Los Alamos. Taylor claimed that Valar was the first startup to “split the atom,” rowing that back after it was pointed out that other venture-backed companies had done it years earlier.
Work at the San Rafael Energy Lab moved quickly. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
significant piece of Valar’s safety case is its choice of fuel. Called TRISO (for “tristructural isotopic”), the fuel is fabricated so that every uranium particle is encased in a ceramic coating that can withstand extremely high heat and will contain within it nearly all the radioactive fission products that are created as the uranium starts splitting. ………….. The big downsides are that TRISO is expensive to make, and there is very little available. Valar was planning to manufacture its own on-site, but that facility was nothing more than a patch of concrete when I saw it.
Finally, we entered the reactor building. A large U.S. flag had been stuck to the wall, and the ground was a vast pad of exposed concrete that ran several feet deep. Near the center of this pad, looking somewhat small within the hangar’s voluminous interior, the reactor vessel stood upright, a rounded steel cylinder maybe 15 feet high and painted black. In Valar’s design, helium will draw the heat off the reactor core through a U-shaped pipe that runs through a trench and up again into an Escheresque complex of what looked like off-the-shelf steel ducts. These contained a heat exchanger, a purification system for the helium, and a squat red vessel, studded with steel bolts, that will pump the helium through the system……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://newrepublic.com/article/210095/donald-trump-nuclear-energy-regulations-valar-atomics?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily
Why Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Are a Dead End
The big question is, can SMRs deliver on their promises to overcome the historic drawbacks of conventional nuclear power? The answer is no.
Richard Heinberg, May 19, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/smrs-dead-end
The nuclear power industry is currently promoting designs for small modular reactors, or SMRs, that will supposedly be cheaper, safer, and faster to build than older nuclear power plants. Bill Gates and Amazon are investing in the technology. Moreover, some environmentalists, including Mark Lynas and Bill McKibben, support SMRs in the hope that they can lower carbon emissions. And, according to polls, far more Americans now approve of the development of nuclear energy than was the case just a decade or two ago.
This year, the world has been plunged into a global energy crisis: With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, nearly a fifth of world oil shipments have been held up, with economic impacts likely to reverberate for months or years. World leaders are suddenly desperate for energy alternatives, and are turning to solar, coal, and nuclear. At the same time, electricity demand for data centers is exploding, and builders of those centers hope to use SMRs to power artificial intelligence (AI).
In short, it looks like a great moment for the nuclear industry.
Yet Indigenous peoples, technology critics, and old-school environmentalists still oppose nukes—even in new, highly touted forms. I agree with their critiques. In this article, we’ll look at the current nuclear revival and see why it may end up being a zombie attack.
Nuclear Renaissance?
Before looking at SMRs specifically, it’s helpful to understand the status of the nuclear industry in more general terms. The industry’s potential resurgence comes after three decades in the doldrums following the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986. Today, roughly 440 nuclear power plants, spread across 30 countries and with a combined net capacity of around 400 gigawatts (GW), provide about 10% of the world’s electricity.
If you think, as I do, that the global polycrisis is an inevitable outgrowth of industrialism and its consequences (resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation), then you’re likely to view SMRs as a pointless and dangerous waste of resources.
The US, which has the largest number of plants of any country (96), is seeing a slow phaseout of old reactors (average age 44 years), but has commissioned three new ones during the last decade. China is now operating 60 reactors, with up to 40 others under construction. India is likewise hoping to grow its nuclear industry rapidly and is experimenting with fast breeder reactors. Globally, the International Energy Agency forecasts total nuclear power capacity to grow to over 700 GW by 2050, and small modular reactors are expected to make up a significant share of this growth. A year ago, the Trump administration unveiled an ambitious nuclear strategy that includes a goal to quadruple the United States’ nuclear capacity by 2050, with SMRs playing a key role.
The principal drivers of renewed interest in nuclear power are climate change (globally), the Trump administration (in the US), tech companies’ voracious demand for electricity, and Asian nations’ hunger for more industrial power. Most nations want to limit their carbon emissions, and the main low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels are solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear. Solar and wind are intermittent (“variable”) sources, requiring energy storage to align electricity supply with demand. Hydro has limited potential for growth. That leaves nuclear power, which has the advantage of being reliable and steady, and has possibilities for expansion.
If it’s helpful to understand why the industry is growing again, it’s just as important to know the reasons for its long period of dormancy:
Cost: Nuclear power plants are complex and expensive, employing technology that’s internationally regulated due to concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons. Despite over 80 years of the industry’s development, nuclear plants still take a long time to build and are often plagued with cost overruns.- Fuel: Uranium, the fuel for nearly all existing nuclear power plants, is a depleting nonrenewable resource, and supplies are running short. Uranium mining is a dirty, expensive process, and mine closures, mostly due to resource depletion, are expected to lead to fuel shortfalls by 2035. While geologists have identified more uranium resources, opening new mines will entail further environmental destruction and harm to human communities, of which the uranium mining industry already has a grim history.
- Waste: Despite decades of research, the global nuclear industry still has found no good place to put the 300,000 tons of nuclear waste—as well as 480,000 tons of depleted uranium in the US alone—that it has produced in the last 80+ years.
- Safety: While nuclear accidents are relatively rare, they can be devastating and expensive when they occur. The Fukushima disaster of 2011 resulted in direct cleanup costs of up to $180 billion as of 2016, but the damage still has not been completely contained, and indirect costs to human health have been estimated at half a trillion dollars. Further, nuclear power technology is still tied to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.
- Water Issues: Nearly all nuclear power plants use water as a coolant and are highly vulnerable to droughts and floods. Droughts reduce the availability of water for cooling, while floods (nuclear plants are generally built next to rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water) damage safety infrastructure and risk contaminating water sources.
If the nuclear industry can overcome its historic obstacles, a door is open. According to the industry, small modular reactors are the main way forward.
SMRs: Promise or Hype?
The main arguments for SMRs are that they would be cheaper and faster to build than conventional power plants; that they would be safer; and, being smaller, that they could be installed to power remote towns or data centers. The idea is to build components in a centralized factory and then assemble those components at power generation sites.
“Small” is defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less. While most existing nuclear plants are in the one-gigawatt (1,000 MW) range, some proposed SMRs are 20 megawatts or less; these are called “micro” reactors.
For the most part, SMRs are still at the design stage. China has one SMR under construction. In the United States, TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, has received a permit to build a 345-megawatt (not exactly “small,” but close) sodium-cooled reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
Clearly it is possible to get funding and approval for these new-generation power plants. The big question is, can SMRs deliver on their promises to overcome the historic drawbacks of conventional nuclear power?
- Cost: SMRs will only be cheaper to build if large numbers are ordered; the first prototypes may be even more costly than conventional plants. Meanwhile, construction costs per MW of capacity will likely be higher, and operating costs are largely unknown until real-world data can be collected. The cost of electricity from SMRs is therefore also yet-to-be-determined, but preliminary estimates put it much higher than solar or wind.
- Fuel: Most proposed SMRs use uranium, but some designs on the drawing boards would use depleted uranium or thorium as fuels (see below). For now, however, the uranium fuel constraint looming over the nuclear industry remains in place. SMRs also won’t use their fuel more efficiently than conventional reactors, despite some claims to the contrary.
- Uranium From Seawater: The supply limits of uranium could be greatly expanded by harvesting it from seawater, where the potential resource is enormous—albeit at a concentration of about 3.3 parts per billion. The total oceanic uranium resource is estimated at 4.5 billion tons, over 500 times all identified land-based uranium resources. However, extracting the uranium will take a lot of energy: The best existing technology using absorbent materials will offer an energy return on energy invested (ERoEI) of about 4:1, which is lower than the ERoEI for solar, wind, hydro, fossil fuels, or conventional uranium mining.
- Waste: Some proposed SMR designs would be breeder reactors that could get rid of depleted uranium or even nuclear waste by using them as fuels—but this technology has faced significant challenges (see below). Otherwise, SMRs will do nothing to solve, and may actually worsen, the nuclear waste dilemma.
- Safety: SMRs are designed to be safer than conventional nuclear plants, using passive, gravity-driven cooling systems that don’t require electricity or human intervention to shut down. However, their overall safety is controversial. There is still no real-world data to support the industry’s promises. And having lots of smaller nuclear plants dotted across the landscape could make it easier for nuclear materials to end up in the hands of bad actors. The resilience of SMRs in the face of more frequent and more severe natural disasters is also controversial; a 2021 study concluded that storms, droughts, and higher ambient temperatures linked to climate change are likely to pose operational risks to all nuclear power plants.
The biggest remaining advantages of SMRs are the speed with which they could bedeployed once the manufacturing infrastructure is in place, and the prospect of providing non-grid-tied dedicated power sources for data centers.
What About Further Technological Advances?
When confronted with the limits of one technology, nuclear advocates often shift the conversation to another. However, close examination usually shows that each technological “solution” has its own problems:
Fast-Breeder Reactors: If nuclear fuel is scarce, why not develop fast breeders, which produce more nuclear fuel than they consume? Currently, Russia operates two fast breeders and India’s first one reached criticality in late April. China has a fast-breeder reactor for research. The US, France, and Japan operated breeders in the past but have shut down research along these lines due to high capital and operational costs, safety risks related to sodium coolant, and nuclear proliferation concerns.
- Alternative Cooling Systems: Water-cooled reactors (a category that includes nearly all existing commercial nuclear plants) pose risks of loss-of-coolant accidents due to pipe breaks, high-pressure operation failures, age-related component deterioration, and earthquakes or other natural disasters. The industry’s solution: Use sodium or helium as a coolant. Unfortunately, sodium is highly chemically reactive and ignites upon contact with air and reacts explosively with water, while helium is a depleting non-renewable resource that is becoming economically scarce at a rapid rate.
- Thorium Reactors: If uranium is scarce and might lead to weapons proliferation, why not use more abundant thorium? China already has an experimental two-megawatt thorium reactor in the Gobi Desert. However, thorium reactors have steep development costs and produce a highly radioactive byproduct, uranium-232, which decays into isotopes that emit penetrating gamma rays, making fuel handling and maintenance more hazardous and costly. Also, thorium reactors require a “driver” fuel: Thorium-232 is fertile, not fissile, meaning it needs a different radioactive fuel (like uranium or plutonium) to initiate the chain reaction. Therefore, proliferation concerns remain.
Currently, there is little real-world data regarding these “new” nuclear technologies, even though all have been discussed or experimented with for decades. The nuclear industry hasn’t actually solved its many dilemmas, and the current nuclear renaissance isn’t being driven by novel solutions so much as by the rapid worsening of society’s energy-related problems, primarily climate change: World leaders are now so desperate for reliable low-carbon energy sources that they are willing to overlook substantial risks, if only the nuclear industry will put a shiny gloss on its latest iteration of products. And leaders of the tech industry, keenly aware of the soaring electricity demand from AI, are even more desperate for ways to power the exponential growth of their companies without risking a backlash from the rest of society, which may suffer from higher electricity prices or shortages.
If Not SMRs, Then What?
Nuclear power is a product of high-tech modern industrialism. The proponents of nuclear power assume—and nuclear reactors rely on—global supply chains, uninterrupted grid power, reliable water resources, and functioning political systems. The future that’s unfolding around us is a polycrisis in which supply chains, grid power, water, weather, and politics-as-usual are all threatened. In these unfolding circumstances, the only solutions that make sense are ones that are small-scale, local, low-risk, and nature based.
What to do about carbon emissions? Yes, we need to replace fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources—but these should be as low-tech as possible, and we should aim to reduce overall energy usage.
What to do about AI data centers? That’s easy: Don’t build them. We are rushing headlong into an AI-managed future without an adequate understanding of what AI is, does, or is likely to do in the future. Besides, AI appears to be perhaps the biggest investment bubble in history.
Most political and economic leaders have taken the attitude that we must go to any possible lengths to save industrial modernity. But industrial modernity is the essence of our problem: It is a crisis-generating machine—and one that, prior to its inevitable self-destruction, is creating enormous wealth for a small minority of people, while entrapping everyone else in dreary systems of employment, payment, debt, dependency, and distraction that leave little time for reflection on the futility of it all.
Moreover, SMRs will do nothing to solve our immediate global energy crisis. The oil shortages that are already sweeping over the world in the wake of the US-Iran war cannot, in most cases, be offset with electricity—at least not right away. While electrification is a good interim energy strategy for gradually winding down modernity with minimal casualties, it’s one that will take time, and some things will be hard or impossible to meaningfully electrify—including heavy manufacturing and air travel. Meanwhile, the world needs gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel now; SMRs will take decades to deploy.
The opinion you hold about SMRs will have a lot to do with your general attitude toward technology. If you think humanity’s fate and future rest with high tech (including AI and advanced rockets to enable colonization of other planets), then you’re almost guaranteed to believe that SMRs will help us get there. But if you think, as I do, that the global polycrisis is an inevitable outgrowth of industrialism and its consequences (resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation), then you’re likely to view SMRs as a pointless and dangerous waste of resources.
Once we see why industrial modernity is unsustainable, the most important question becomes: What is a viable exit strategy? On our way out the door of modernity and back toward simplicity, we need to minimize the creation of new problems and relearn nature’s elegant solutions. When our priorities are thus reoriented, nuclear power makes no sense.
1 This Month
of the week- – THE ONENESS of HUMANITY
We the Nuclear Free North
1st July – Webinar Waste of Space: The Environmental Harm of Military and Civil Space Activity st July, 7 pm
Report Launch Online: We are seeing an increasing exploitation of space for military and commercial purposes. This must change.
Protect Sazan Island from the Trump family! https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/protect_sazan_island_from_the_trump_family_loc/?bqFCVab&v=174511&cl=22707147157&_checksum=5e9dde668860e8231c33699735e16a1fbf22ab2cb01da50c999fe8732b9775ef&utm_source=email&utm_medium=blast_email&utm_campaign=174511
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- June 2026 (258)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 